Last night’s Face Books Tour event at Orinda Books went off splendidly. The room was packed and many people left with raffle tickets, having purchased the wonderful books our readers wrote.

The theme of the reading was The Power of Story, addressed from many angles by the fiction and non-fiction writers who presented.

Next event is the Clayton Books Authors Festival on April 26, and then we’ll be at Bookshop West Portal on May 7 and May 14, 7 p.m., with two entirely different and wonderful line-ups. Check out my events link and the Face Books Tour link for much more information.

In other news: The wonderful Ellen Sussman is holding a special Master Class in Mystery Writing at her gorgeous home in Los Altos. Here’s the write-up from Ellen, and there is still room left. Tell her I sent you:

Master Class on Writing the Mystery Novel

Three acclaimed mystery writers, Cornelia Read, Keith Raffel and John Billheimer, will join me in a panel discussion about their craft. I’ll ask them about plotting the mystery novel, about character development, about conventions of the genre, about breaking those conventions. I’d like to find out what we non-mystery writers can learn from these masters of plot, character, voice. And for those of you who are writing mysteries, we can find out how these three have succeeded in a very competitive field.

About the guest speakers:

Cornelia Read is the acclaimed author of A Field of Darkness and The Crazy School. The Drood Review voted John Billheimer’s first book, The Contrary Blues, one of the ten best mysteries of 1998. Four subsequent novels explore various scams and scandals in the coal fields of his native state of West Virginia. Bookreporter.com called Keith Raffel’s Dot Dead: A Silicon Valley Mystery “without question the most impressive mystery debut of the year.”

Date: Wednesay, May 13, 6:30 – 9:30
Place: at my house in Los Altos Hills.
Cost: $60

Contact Ellen by email: ellen (at) ellensussman (dot) com

I (Elizabeth) just read a draft of Cornelia’s next book and I LOVED it. This is sure to

be a wonderful evening, and I’m hoping to be there myself if the babies and partner allow it .

. .

I have been all charged up about some recent finds I want to share with you.

One is Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid — a book, audiobook and system for marketing and building your business that takes that brave journey away from crass, haranguing, uphill effort and turns it into connecting with what you love and sharing it. That sounds simplistic, but it’s not. His book is packed with information and a powerful approach. These are times when many of us are shifting around our economic models and tracks, and if you are building your own business–including writing-related businesses (such as being a published author!), I cannot recommend this highly enough.

The second find is thanks to author Cornelia Read, and this is a series of blogs on craft written by Alexandra Sokoloff. You can find Sokoloff and the amazing craft blogs at Murderati.com or at thedarksalon.blogspot.com. Scroll down the right margin and you’ll get to a list of “Writing Articles.” She’s trained in theater and screenwriting and writes suspense–all of which contain keys to any writing, even the most poetic literary flights. Her blogs are immensely readable and incredibly clear. They make me want to try things in writing, always a good sign.

Alexandra Sokoloff, in turn, recommended reading The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (subtitle: And Other Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence). I’m in the middle of it and it is amazing. Besides that it should be required reading for anyone who might encounter violence (which is, as he convinces you quickly, anyone) and especially women (who too often choose not to be rude over listening to their instincts), it’s great reading for anyone interested in understanding human behavior. Everyone, more or less, should fall into that last category, too, but especially writers. That’s what we’re doing alone at the keyboard, no?

This is some of what I am jazzed about right now. What are your latest finds?